Remembering Cordelia Taylor and her community.
Cordelia Taylor, the founder of Family House in Milwaukee, died last week. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, on the program staff of which we Giving Review co-editors worked for a collective sum of decades, substantially supported Family House.
In co-editor William A. Schambra’s remarks to a conference—“A Place in the World: Geography, Identity, and Civic Engagement in Modern America,” at Pepperdine University in March 2011—he talked about Taylor, describing Family House and this support. The remarks are below. We also published previous remarks by Schambra about Taylor here.
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For the past seven or eight years, I have made an annual pilgrimage to Georgetown University to speak to a class of graduate students in public policy—yes, for full two hours every year, they are pitilessly exposed to the unhinged ravings of a conservative.
I begin the account of my otherwise deeply perplexing political inclinations by noting that they are rooted in a sense of place.
I grew up among the townships of mid-Michigan, I tell them, where strong local communities created a solid, nurturing moral and religious climate for healthy families and children, and where the need to manage their own affairs provided the schools of citizenship so important in Tocqueville’s account of the conditions of American democracy.
That sense of local community, I maintain to them, is worth preserving against displacement by big government, as well as atomization by the marketplace.
In the discussion that follows, almost invariably the first objection is this: what you say may be fine for the well-off. (They have never seen the abandoned farms dotting the logged-off, inhospitably sandy soil of my youth.)
But what about those who live in places of poverty, where none of these community institutions exist? Don’t we need more encompassing, national solutions in such cases?
This is a fair question. If the perspective of place cannot speak to the needs of the poor and marginalized, it would have a significant moral and political blind spot.
But in an age when formal, professionally run social service programs for the poor are prime candidates for the budget balancers’ chopping block, the place perspective does offer a plausible alternative, and will have to become part of any future approach to the problems of poverty.
Let me explain by introducing you to one of the most courageous and effectively compassionate people I know, Mrs. Cordelia Taylor.
As a young person, Mrs. Taylor had prepared herself for a professional career in elder care management, with degrees in nursing and administration.
But she was appalled by what she found in the large, institutional settings where she began work. The elderly were neglected and abused, treated with none of the dignity they possessed as, in her view, children of God.
So she returned to her home on 11th Street in inner city Milwaukee where she had reared her children, and launched her own senior care facility, starting with just 12 residents.
With funds and volunteer labor from local churches, and ultimately with grants from The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, she purchased and rehabbed the neighboring houses one by one, connecting them with wooden ramps.
Her growing compound soon surrounded a pleasant lawn and several garden plots, raised so that her residents could still get their hands in the soil.
Accented by a water fountain and bird feeders, this tranquil setting became the safest, kindest, most restful place her low-income African American residents had ever lived—a glimpse of the heaven in which Mrs. Taylor so fervently believed.
But Family House, as it was appropriately called, was more than just another community-based senior care facility. It soon became the center of neighborhood life.
Children started showing up on her porch, simply to hang out in a place where adults spoke to them with respect and love.
Mrs. Taylor’s son formed a homework club for them, and when a volunteer offered to teach them judo, the basement became their dojo. Family House was now a senior care and martial arts facility.
Mrs. Taylor noted that many of the children were asking for canned food to take home to their mothers toward the end of the month, as groceries ran low.
So she began teaching them how to prepare and stretch out nutritious meals on small incomes. She also began hiring them to work as aides at Family House—now apparently a senior care, martial arts, home economics, and job training facility.
With Mrs. Taylor at its heart, this impoverished neighborhood in fact began to take on some of the attributes of Tocqueville’s township, becoming a safer place for families and children, a seedbed of personal responsibility and moral principle, and a venue for self-governance.
The example of Family House speaks to the critical difference between fighting poverty with place, rather than with programs.
Trained to run large, impersonal programs, Mrs. Taylor instead felt a call to exercise her vocation back in the place where she had reared her family and which she had come to love, no matter how unlovely its deterioration over the years may have rendered it to outsiders.
But once Family House became securely of the neighborhood, not just in it, the local community began bringing other, unrelated problems to the feet of this wise elder.
She took them on, heedless of management school doctrine that this constituted perilous “mission drift,” because this was how her place, her community, spoke to her of its needs.
No remote, rational program planner could have anticipated, much less designed a coherent initiative for, the peculiar constellation of strengths and weaknesses that Mrs. Taylor found on 11th Street.
But her sense of place, her love of this neighborhood, demanded that she address those needs as they arose, one by seemingly disjointed one, rather than adhering to the narrow path dictated by her professional discipline.
Mrs. Taylor’s attitude is, of course, anathema to the mainstream, program-based approach to poverty.
That approach grew out of the American progressive movement, which assured us that the powerful new forces of the early 20thcentury—industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and so forth—had forever doomed the notion of place in America, by sweeping away the boundaries of local communities.
Happily, the new century also brought with it new sciences of nature and society—modern medicine, public health, economics, sociology, psychology, and public administration—that taught us how to harness and control those forces.
But only the intelligent few, well-versed in the emerging professional disciplines, would be qualified to deal with the problems of the 20th century.
As Thomas Haskell argued, it was largely through the social scientist’s “explanatory prowess that men might learn to understand their complex situation, and largely through his predictive ability that men might cooperatively control society’s future.”
In the words of preeminent progressive Herbert Croly, “in the more complex, the more fluid, and the more highly energized, equipped, and differentiated society of today,” the “cohesive element” would be “the completest social record,” which could be assembled only by social science experts “using social knowledge in the interest of valid social purposes.”
This would all be well beyond the ken of the vast majority of everyday Americans, locked as they still were within the narrow horizons of their parochial worlds.
Their views were hopelessly constricted by their rootedness in place—in the benighted ethnic, moral, and religious communities from which they continued to draw their beliefs, in spite of the fact that science had proven them baseless and that technology had breached their borders.
To some extent, a new kind of progressive education would weaken those beliefs among, and bring enlightenment to, the masses.
In the meantime, though, the new century’s complexities demanded that political authority be transferred away from retrograde, place-hobbled everyday citizens into the hands of the more cosmopolitan, professional elites, and upward from smaller, local jurisdictions where tradition-bound opinions tended to predominate, to higher national levels of authority, where sophisticated expertise more easily held sway.
The expert few, in turn, would design programs to service the needs of citizens—now better understood as clients—who had no appreciation of the complexity of the social forces shaping their lives, and were fortunate indeed to enjoy the ministrations of public servants who did.
The quintessential progressive sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross captured this approach in his early 20th century, multi-edition textbook Principles of Sociology:
[America suffers from] thousands of local groups sewed up in separatist dogmas and dead to most of the feelings which thrill the rest of society. … [The remedy is the] widest possible diffusion of secular knowledge among the many, which narrows the power of the fanatic or the false prophet to gain a following, [plus] university training for the few, which rears up a type of leader who will draw men together with unifying thoughts, instead of dividing them, as does the sect-founder, with his private imaginings and personal notions.
This perspective is, of course, what my Georgetown interlocutors have imbibed.
It prompts them to insist that a sense of place is of no use to poor neighborhoods, and indeed may hold them back. In their view, only national social programs designed by leaders with “unifying thoughts” can address problems of poverty.
I have to remind them, however, that we have now had a full century of experience with the elites’ science-driven, program approach to poverty.
And it can hardly be said that poor communities are better off for it.
The irony, as Nathan Glazer pointed out in The Limits of Social Policy, is that the very programs meant to alleviate social problems in fact only compounded them.
The indigenous community institutions so contemptible to progressives were in fact a neighborhood’s first line of defense against social ills, and their subversion unleashed far more misery than substitute social programs could contain.
As Glazer put it, our social policies were “trying to deal with the breakdown of traditional ways of handling distress” located in “the family … the ethnic group, the neighborhood, the church.”
But such policies were only weakening those structures further by snatching from them their function and authority, “making matters in some important respects worse.”
Recognizing this, beginning in the 60s, the social policy experts adopted a new emphasis on the role of place in the war on poverty.
But this hardly meant that the experts would now seek out the local wisdom of community elders in poor places, or bolster their native institutions.
It simply meant that expert-designed programs would be reassembled at the local level in such a way that they vaguely resembled a naturally occurring community, only vastly more expensive and less effective.
As John McKnight put it, the professionals would displace genuine community with a “comprehensive, multidisciplinary, coordinated, interagency ‘wrap-around’ service system,” with sporadic and ineffectual input from a seldom-convened advisory board of pliant community members.
A dispute would arise later in the social service industry between those who argued for such a “place-based” approach versus those believing in “people-based” approaches, which would enable the poor to vacate impoverished places altogether.
But a so-called place-based approach still rooted in a reliance on professionalism is in truth no friendlier to genuine place than the alternative, which is outright hostile to it.
The example of Cordelia Taylor, however, suggests the possibility of a radically different kind of place-based approach to poverty.
My experience with her and scores of others like her whom I have met through the good offices of Bob Woodson has persuaded me that, in fact, local communities—even the most poverty-stricken—have developed ways of dealing with their own problems their own way.
Such undertakings are largely invisible to us because they bear no resemblance to the massive, bureaucratic nonprofit delivery systems our professionals have built, and which we too often mistake for “civil society.”
Genuine community groups are typically very small and volunteer-driven, operating out of dilapidated store-fronts with water stains on their ceiling tiles and duct tape on their industrial carpeting.
They have none of the professional program staffs and trained fund-raisers that bring larger, more polished nonprofits to the attention of government and private funders.
They typically explain their undertakings not with the language of social science causality, but rather by resorting to hopelessly antiquated spiritual and moral categories like good and evil, God and Satan, sin and redemption.
Although they may start out, as did Family House, with one mission in mind, they typically accrue other missions as the neighborhood comes to it with other needs.
And the neighborhood will come, for here, residents are treated as fellow citizens by leaders they know well, rather than as clients by professionals who drop into the community from nine to five.
The result may well be an apparently incoherent agglomeration of activities that no rational program planner would have designed, and that puts off potential funders, who are looking for concise mission statements and coherent theories of change.
As Leon Watkins of Family Helpline in Los Angeles put it,
When someone comes in and tells me their house just burnt down, or they bring in a little girl with serious mental problems and she has no place to stay, what program do you put that under? It’s hard to explain to people that concept. People who pledge support want to see programs. But that’s what life is like here—whatever comes up, that’s the program.
Building around whatever comes up from the immediate community instead of what professionals design for the community—and will ultimately do to the community—that is what constitutes a genuinely place-based approach to poverty.
It’s clear why my Georgetown interlocutors, as they train to become the designers of professional service programs, should balk at this approach.
It suggests that they are being equipped with skills that have not proven effective, while donning blinders against approaches that have.
Their profession will teach them to brush past the amateurish, unprofessional, uncoordinated, irrational efforts of neighborhood leaders like Mrs. Taylor, in search of the powerful but hidden social forces beneath the neighborhood that produce poverty in the first place—forces which their expertise will now uniquely equip them to understand and master.
A place-based perspective isn’t so much hostile to their progressive ideological inclinations as it is to their choice of professional vocation, which they are pursuing with great effort and expense at a demanding and prestigious institution of higher learning.
Now, the dominance of American social policy by publicly funded professionals claiming mastery of social trends may be powerfully challenged over the next decade.
Public budgets everywhere are in jeopardy, and it looks as if last on the list for cuts will be the primary culprits behind our mounting deficits—major entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.
First on the list will be discretionary spending for social services—the dollars designed to create those expensive virtual communities in our neighborhoods.
But skeptics of government spending will have to do more than criticize it and rejoice in its almost certain abeyance.
They will have to reflect on ways to address the problems that the programs never seemed to touch.
Those who bring to social policy a particular sensitivity to the importance of place can perform a great service in these times.
They are unencumbered by the framework of elite professionalism, with its reliance on social services.
They can be attuned to and appreciative of the importance of local institutions and local wisdom, even in the poorest and seemingly most desolate of communities, which have been given up as barren wastelands by the professionals.
A strong place orientation should be able to identify as healthy self-governance a kind of neighborhood activity that may appear to some to be chaotic, disorganized, and amateurish.
A place perspective understands and embraces the infinite variety of communities in America, each with different strengths and weaknesses, different needs and different answers to them.
It does not try to shoulder aside those differences on the way to larger underlying truths, because it understands that to do so is to violate the integrity—and further diminish the capabilities—of the immediate and concrete communities before us.
In other words, a place perspective is important for the struggle against poverty not only because the most effective neighborhood leaders bring it to their efforts, but also because their efforts remain largely invisible or indecipherable unless observers come similarly equipped with that perspective.
Understood in this way, a place perspective is indispensable to any future struggle against poverty.
